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Track Changes #28 – Rational Geographic

[32:31]

Aaron: Nobody understands why a gazetteer is important until they suddenly need one and then they’re, like, wait, oh what, how do we…

Paul: That’s been the miracle of the web, to me, right, it’s that you’d be like I want to build this thing and then you very rapidly stumble into the need for a large set of data with a lot of tasks. Like, I need historical texts or I need a list of places or whatever and it’s just amazing how often you get back to that.

And that whole part of our world is surprisingly untended. Right? And you go, oh get this a list of businesses but it’s from 2010 and no one has adopted it since. I’ve been actually thinking, like there isn’t really, as far as I can tell – maybe you know better than I would, but there’s an idea that I’m going to adopt this open source project, or give this into to the commons, or I’m going to open this thing but there’s no culture of adopting big data sets and taking care of them in the same way as there is as putting things on github and doing releases as open source software… that I know about.

….

[34:10]

Aaron: I guess the example of people who are doing that are the New York Public Library.

Aaron: … and then providing tools for letting people work in little atomic units but even then some of it is a question of scale, I mean for all that the NYPL does amazing work they’re pretty reluctant to offer those services outside of New York City.

Paul: No, of course. What’s bugging me is I think that everyone sees code as the infrastructure for creativity and doing new work online, and I think it’s also data, and we don’t really, that’s not a conversation that people really have that much.